Elon Musk’s satellites to be part of UK trial to get internet to remote areas - The Guardian

Elon Musk’s outer Starlink technology is to beryllium portion of a UK authorities proceedings to get amended net connectivity to distant parts of the country.

The technology, which uses much than 3,000 debased Earth orbit tiny satellites to beam a broadband awesome and is operated by the steadfast SpaceX, volition initially beryllium trialled astatine 3 distant locations – Rievaulx Abbey successful North Yorkshire Moors nationalist park, Wasdale Head successful the Lake District and 2 sites wrong Snowdonia nationalist park, the authorities said.

Recent tests person shown that successful galore locations, Starlink satellites tin present net speeds of up to 200 megabits a 2nd – 4 times faster than the existent UK mean broadband velocity of conscionable implicit 50Mbps, The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said.

The authorities said it was continuing to look astatine the capableness of the system, arsenic good arsenic looking astatine different solutions and services with antithetic suppliers.

Musk, the world’s richest man, has go a polarising fig successful caller months pursuing a turbulent takeover of Twitter that has divided sentiment due to the fact that of his propulsion for little contented moderation connected the societal media level and wide layoffs of staff.

On the outer scheme, civilization caput Michelle Donelan said: “High-speed broadband beamed to Earth from abstraction could beryllium the reply to the connectivity issues suffered by radical successful premises stuck successful the integer dilatory lane.

“Ensuring everyone tin get a prime net transportation is important to our levelling up plans and these trials purpose to find a solution to the prohibitively precocious outgo of rolling retired cables to far-flung locations.”

Last month, Musk announced his institution would proceed to wage for Starlink outer net successful Ukraine, a time aft suggesting helium could not support backing the task which helium said was losing astir $20m a month.

He tweeted: “The hellhole with it. Even though Starlink is inactive losing wealth & different companies are getting billions of payer $, we’ll conscionable support backing Ukraine govt for free.”

Musk drew the ire of Ukrainians past period erstwhile helium posted a tweet suggesting a Ukraine-Russia bid woody that included formally annexing Crimea to Russia and holding UN-supervised elections successful 4 Russian-occupied regions successful Ukraine. Musk aboriginal denied a study that helium had spoken to Vladimir Putin earlier floating the plan, which helium had presented arsenic a Twitter poll.